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Is Your Brand Awareness Strategy Missing the Mark?

Brand awareness should be a focal point of any marketing campaign. This tough-to-pin-down metric is a general reflection of how well a given audience recognizes and knows a particular brand. For companies trying to earn recognition, patronage and sustained loyalty from a base of dedicated consumers, developing a brand awareness strategy is the place to start.

Awareness isn't easy to come by: It takes a combination of time, money, resources and creativity to build it among an audience large enough to sustain a company. For a business like Coca-Cola, it's a decades-long work in progress, and one of its best drivers of sales. Few companies today, if any, have the luxury of planning out that far ahead, but there's a simple, universal lesson from Coca-Cola's example: When executed properly, brand awareness strategies can pay dividends for years to come.

That said, many companies fail to leverage that potential into a strong base of awareness. If that's the case for your business, don't be discouraged. You simply need to make some strategy tweaks to overcome shortcomings in your present approach. Here are some quick tips to help you get your brand awareness efforts back on track.

Identify Your Unique Selling Point

It's one of the biggest challenges brands face, especially new ones in competitive markets: How do you make your brand stand out? With so many options to choose from, consumers are quick to overlook a company that merely provides similar benefits as other, better-known competitors. Brands are most successful when they offer something new, or make a clear improvement on an existing product or service. Show your audience what your brand can do for them that no other brand can.

Build Your Brand as a Resource

A good brand awareness strategy should always feature a solid method for capturing relevant search traffic. Educational content and content that directly addresses common questions, concerns, and interests of your consumer base is very valuable for organic search, as well as paid search strategies and social media.

Entrepreneur points to Ties.com as a perfect example. The website has built a comprehensive library of tie-tying guides and other style content to rank high in relevant online searches, and to immediately flex their value to their target audience. Every brand should brainstorm content strategies that speak to common pain points and offer value to their consumers.

Aim to Connect

Emotional connections build lasting awareness. Brands should build content that not only informs, but also inspires an emotional response from consumers. Marketing content should emphasize how your brand is involved in their daily lives. Aspire to cultivate positive experiences through engagement, personalization and success stories shared by past consumers.

This is also an opportunity to understand your audience and how they might connect with your brand. Ask questions and post polls to increase engagement. Social media can be a great vehicle for building connections, capturing consumer attentions and building sustained loyalty among your core audience.

With the right tweaks and a clear understanding of your brand, you should begin to build lasting awareness among your target audience.